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The scholarly communications sector has built and adopted a series of open identifier and metadata infrastructure systems to great success. Content identifiers (through Crossref and DataCite) and contributor identifiers (through ORCID) have become foundational infrastructure to the industry.

But there still seems to be one piece of the infrastructure that is missing. There is as yet no open, stakeholder-governed infrastructure for organization identifiers and associated metadata.

In order to understand this gap, Crossref, DataCite and ORCID have been collaborating to:

A bit different from our traditional meetings, Crossref LIVE16 next week is the first of a totally new annual event for the scholarly communications community. Our theme is Smart alone; brilliant together. We have a broad program of both informal and plenary talks across two days. There will be stations to visit, conversation starters, and entertainment, that highlight what our community can achieve if it works together.

New features, new indexing, new name - oh my!

TL;DR The indexing of Similarity Check users’ content into the shared full-text database is about to get a lot faster. Now we need members assistance in helping Turnitin (the company who own and operate the iThenticate plagiarism checking tool) to transition to a new method of indexing content.

For existing Similarity Check users: please check that your metadata includes full-text URLs so that Turnitin can quickly and easily locate and index your content. Full-text URLs need to be included in 90% of journal article metadata by 31st December 2016.

Watch for two important emails on September 30th – one with a voting link and material, and one with your username and password. RunningCrossref well is a key part of our mission. It’s important that we be as neutral and fair as possible, and we are always striving for that balance. One of our stated principles is “One member, one vote”. And each year we encourage each of our members-standing at over 6000 today-to participate in the election of new board members.

TL;DR

Crossref will be updating its DOI Display Guidelines within the next couple of weeks. This is a big deal. We last made a change in 2011 so it’s not something that happens often or that we take lightly. In short, the changes are to drop “dx” from DOI links and to use “https:” rather than “http:”. An example of the new best practice in displaying a Crossref DOI link is: https://doi.org/10.1629/22161

You might recognize my name if you’ve ever applied for Crossref membership on behalf of your organization. It recently occurred to me that, since I’ve been working in our membership department for eight years, I’ve been a part of shepherding new members for half of our history. And my, how we’ve grown.

On September 1st we completed the final stage of the Crossmark v2.0 release and sent an email to all participating publishers containing instructions for upgrading. The first phase of v2.0 happened when we changed the design and layout of the Crossmark box back in May of this year. That allowed us to better display the growing set of additional metadata that our members are depositing, and saw the introduction of the Linked Clinical Trialsfeature.

We first met the team from PaperHiveat SSP in June, pointed them in the direction of the Crossref Metadata APIand let things progress from there. That’s the nice thing about having an API - because it’s a common and easy way for developers to access and use metadata, it makes it possible to use with lots of diverse systems and services.

So how are things going? Alexander Naydenov, PaperHive’s Co-founder gives us an update on how they’re working with the Crossref metadata:

TL;DR Crossref and Datacite provide a service to link publications and data. The easiest way for Crossref members to participate in this is to cite data using DataCite DOIs and to include them in the references within the metadata deposit. These data citations are automatically detected. Alternatively and/or additionally, Crossref members can deposit data citations (regardless of identifier) as a relation type in the metadata. Data & software citations from both methods are freely propagated.

Everyone is invited to our free annual event this 1-2 November in London. (Register here)
In years past, only Crossref members typically attended the [Crossref Annual Meeting](/crossref-live-annual). This year, we looked at the event with new eyes. We realized that we’d have even richer conversations, more creative energy, and the meeting would be even better for our members if we could rally the entire community together. So we decided to re-develop our annual event from the ground-up.